AOL wants to be bought

It’s no secret that AOL has been languishing in obscurity for the past couple of years. The once great ISP, search, and mobile content giant has been replaced by cheaper (read: free), faster, and more impressive offerings. The company has held on to a faint shred of profitability and dignity, maintaining independence while they strip away and outsource their offerings. The pain, it seems, is about to end. AOL has officially announced that they’re on the market and open to offers of partnership and/or acquisition. According to AOL CEO Jeffrey Bewkes, the company is open to “whatever configuration makes it the strongest and the most valuable.” Ok. We suggest ritual suicide, as we are hard pressed to come up with a company that could actually benefit from the purchase of AOL.

AOL’s demise came with the mass adoption of broadband over Dial-up connections. They were basically a content delivery mechanism then and still is now though their mostly redundant since every movie/actor/artist has a webpage somewhere.

I was AOL customer ~15 years ago (wow, that long ago?!?) I Smartened up when I “discovered” PPP and quickly realized that AOL was the Internet on training wheels. Eventually the wheels had to come off….

A google purchase of AOL would better their gtalk application as they could possibly merge the databases as they did with Blogger, though that would be incredibly complicated.

I don’t see Google having much a use for anything else of AOL’s, though their content could help them. And I think it looks like Google would have the most to gain (though very little) from an AOL purchase than anyone else…perhaps a partnership of some sort would be better….

glenn

without any sarcastic comments.. what’s the actual purchase value of aol? does anyone know?

Kunikos

I suggest to the Time Warner execs that it’s time for AOL’s euthanasia.

Christopher Cox

Seriously AOL content is stale, it was yesterday and nobody cares about it anymore. There is absolutely nothing on AOL content was that can’t be found on another more organized web site somewhere. The moment web pages and online content became a mass market comodity where everyone and their momma has one, was the day AOL started going down the tubes. For me, back in the day, AOL was the best and easiest way to get content, and much of that content was not found easily on the broader Internet or not available at all. Those days are now gone, and AOL has absolutely nothing in todays time.

AOL has content that another company would want? Highly unlikely. The only thing AOL has to offer is AIM and possibly parental control software.